Telling stories to children has a great role in their development, children not only enjoy reading activities, but also develop their abilities and vocabulary. It is important that the children enjoy the process and that I create a love for the book that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Educators and parents have the main roles in this area. By reading and telling stories, they introduce children to the world of imagination in which each of them imagines characters in their own unique way, and thus we support children's creativity. This paper describes the research conducted on preschool children. The research was conducted in the Kindergarten Bjelovar in a mixed older group. The aim of the research was to find out the children's knowledge of certain words before reading, and the children's acquisition of new words after reading the stories. The children in this group are used to reading and listening to stories with their teachers and I notice that they like such activities, they were happy to participate and answer questions. In the research part of the paper, an experimental study of telling four stories to preschool children was conducted. What has been investigated is how stimulating stories can be for vocabulary enrichment. The research showed that after telling the stories, the children knew the meaning of more words than in the test conducted before the telling of the stories. It was also investigated whether gender affects word mastery. The results showed that there was no significant difference with regard to gender, except that girls knew the word "tucked in" more, while boys knew the word "sneak out".